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It seems like only yesterday when we were all talking about Robin Thicke or Lana Del Rey or Michael Jackson. Now it’s hard to remember why.

Here, then, is what (little) we did retain from the last three months’ worth of music:

1. We should pick a song of the autumn: The season-long chatter about which song would best capture the summer of 2014 is officially over, and the hands-down winner, according to Billboard and other outlets that attempt to quantify such things, is Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.”

Making it reasonably close, however, was Toronto act MAGIC! and its reggae-ish, post-Police hit “Rude,” which came out of left field to finish a close second, even though it was actually released last fall.

For the record, neither of those songs was among the top 10 predictions made back in May by Shazam, a ubiquitous app that identifies music playing in the vicinity of your smartphone and that had accurately picked the song of summer for three years running. (Its No. 1 guess this year: Ed Sheeran’s Pharrell Williams-produced “Sing.”)

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Picking a consensus song for the fall will be trickier. The season is less clearly defined than the one we’re technically still in. Autumn is, by comparison, ill-defined, and it’s not as though the music suddenly shifts in tone come September.

Case in point: the songs atop Shazam’s latest “Future Hits” chart sound more like July than October. In case Shazam turns out to be right this fall, though, the most interesting possibilities are “Secrets” by Mary Lambert, the Seattle singer who features on Macklemore & Lewis’s gay-rights anthem “Same Love,” and 20-year-old Jasmine V, who enlists Kendrick Lamar’s help on the suitably melancholy “That’s Me Right There.”

2. Being No. 1 isn’t what it used to be: Two statistical bookends for the accelerating shift from ownership to access:

The No. 1 album in Canada for the last week of August, according to fyimusicnews.ca, was rapper Wiz Khalifa’s Blacc Hollywood. Total sales: 5,300 copies.

In the U.S., total weekly album sales for the same period bottomed out at an embarrassing and historic low: under 4 million. Remember the days when an NSYNC album sold more than half that entire total all by itself?

3. The obliteration of our attention spans does have some limits: Just three weeks after Calgary’s Amp Radio adopted QuickHitz — which chops songs in half to squeeze in more hits per hour — it caved under pressure from outraged musicians and switched back to whatever unremarkable format it was using before.

The threat of legal action, not to mention more incensed tweets from Jann Arden, simply proved too daunting.

Now we’ll have to go back to acknowledging our severely compromised attention spans the old-fashioned way: by manually bailing on songs after two minutes.

THE VINYL COUNTDOWN: Just around the time the initial rush of excitement over next week’s release of The Beatles’ mono/vinyl albums will have begun to recede, we’ll get a batch of LP reissues from another ’60s giant.

Sept. 23 will bring a clutch of six oddly chosen vinyl reissues from the vast catalogue of The Beach Boys. The highlights:

Friends (1968): A continuation of the band’s retreat from the complexities of the aborted Smile, and one of their least commercially successful ’60s releases.

20/20 (1969): Their final studio album for Capitol before they left to form their own Brother label. Includes “I Can Hear Music” and “Do It Again.”

Love You (1977): One of the most divisive releases in the band’s catalogue, this cringingly ill-at-ease album lays bare Brian Wilson’s state of mind in unrelenting, child-like detail for all to witness, whether we want to or not.

Also included in this batch of reissues are the band’s first three live records: Beach Boys Concert (1964), Live in London (1970) and the double-LP The Beach Boys in Concert (1973), which gave them a rare gold album during an extended period in the commercial wasteland.

RETRO/ACTIVE: Steel yourself for a double dose of Billy Idol. First up is his autobiography, Dancing With Myself, on Oct. 7.

Two weeks later, it’s Kings & Queens of the Underground, his first studio album in nine years (if you forget his 2006 Christmas album, Happy Holidays, and you really should) and just the seventh album since he launched his post-Generation X solo career way back in 1981.

Produced mostly by Trevor Horn (Seal, Frankie Goes To Hollywood), the album is preceded by “Can’t Break Me Down.” That single, a finely honed bit of guitar-pop, was co-written and produced by Greg Kurstin, best known for his work with Katy Perry, Pink and Tegan and Sara, with whom he worked on last year’s breakthrough, Heartthrob.

NEXT YEAR’S MODEL: New from Communion, the label/collective that brought us Michael Kiwanuka and Ben Howard, comes Fyfe, an enigmatic artist who combines elements of Sam Smith and James Blake. The brooding first single, “For You,” is accessible at thisisfyfe.com.

There’s no one named John Steel in The John Steel Singers. Instead, the Australian five-piece is fronted by one Tim Morrissey, who has mastered a blend of harmony-rich pop and swirling psychedelia that should instantly hit home with fans of Tame Impala.

With echoes of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” “Happy Before” is a place to start the journey.

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